PVC-based surface coverings are widely used to decorate buildings, houses or vehicles. However, PVC-based surface coverings have the drawback of releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which for some of them are toxics.
To reduce or prevent the VOC release it was suggested to replace the volatile components by non-volatile components; However this lead to an important decrease of stiffness of the surface covering while stiffness is an important requirement of resilient surface coverings, especially floor coverings.
It was also suggested to use a polyester, or polyamide layer, as barrier layer or as an intermediate layer in a multiple layers surface coverings. A polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) layer was not commonly used as PVA has a poor adherence to PVC-based layers.
To improve the adherence of PVA to a PVC-based layer comprising inorganic fillers, PCT/EP2009/057107 discloses the use of a barrier layer composition comprising PVA and a silane compound comprising at least one amine function.
However, this solution is not suitable to obtain sufficient adherence of PVA on a PVC-based wear layer comprising no inorganic fillers or very low concentration of inorganic fillers.
Therefore, generally an adhesion primer should be applied on the PVC-based wear layer comprising no fillers, which implies additional process steps and leads to an increase of production costs and technical difficulties.